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Daily notes and commentary -- Week 2Hi, welcome to this second week's daybook page. The reasons for this format are explained in last week's intro. Note that any given weekly page may receive several updates during the week, or even several times during a single day, but it may also mean that some days do not get any special notes at all, or get "retroactively" updated (like if I write something but upload it to the site a day or two later). Occasional thematic articles will still be added on the side as separate pages, like before. Note that webpages live, i.e. content editing may also at times be performed retroactively so that some "established" content may change (links updated for example, new comments) or be moved. Mail inclusions are as a rule on a separate weekly mail page. See Mailnote link in sidebar. The link beside each weekday links to the corresponding weekday in the mail page for the same week. |
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Monday 11.01Strange. This morning I was noodling about with the links after fetching the mail and was sure I had closed the connection. Two hours later I go to connect to my ISP and the pop-up menu entry for the ISP is missing!? I have a real hard look at the RAS manager and discover much to my amazement that I am still sitting on a live TCP/IP dialup to the ISP, yet the RAS icon in the toolbar is not "lit" or showing any activity. Weird. I full the manager and se 1:58 elapsed time. I am live on the modem hook-up, but evidently the ISP server dropped me to inactivity because I can no longer access the POP mailbox nor get a valid DNS. Double weird -- the ISP modem pool should have dropped me offline long ago. Fixing links is not that bad a job -- the tedious part is making sure that the correct pages are shipped up to the host server. (I am not "blessed" with FP automated publishing...)
This must be the years of scandal... not just US domestic politics, but serious accusations of money and sex with regards to how the Committee selected Olympic venues, and now a remarkable crisis between the EU Parliament and the EU Commission where the entire bunch risks dismissal.
Spent the rest of the afternoon painting (fantasy roleplaying) scenarios with my daughter after she came home from school. This means 25 mm tin figurines (a.k.a. scale 1:52) and cardboard benches, tables, and so on to scale. This is something I had fun with many years ago and I still had a number of figures in a box. The kids have both enjoyed trying this form of artistic expression, making several roughly 6 x 8 inch scenes, building rough-hewn stone walls out of sugar lumps, cladding hills, and odd situations. This latest time, I have introduced Therese to oils, after having her work earlier with acrylics and faster drying. I intend to do some macro photos and put them on the site in due time. (I have slides of earlier such photos, but it is expensive here to have these scanned. New photos with scans included in processing is much cheaper.)
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Tuesday 12.01A few snippets of mail starting this week's mail page off. We all in the "daynote club" seem rather busy or worn out this week, however. I had several thoughts during the day of what to write here, while I was busy ferrying kids to school and mother-in-law to a sick friend, all the while slithering in slippery snow and avoiding the erratic weaving of death-defying drivers -- bicycle, car, bus and truck. All those thoughts are gone now at 1 AM. (I might add retroactively here anything I manage to remember later.) Memory is the second thing to go with old age. What the first was I can't remember. (Although I prefer my own, more subtle variation: I can honestly say that I can't remember a single occasion when I have ever forgotten anything.)
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Wednesday 13.01"20th-day", i.e. 20 days after Christmas. Traditional day here for clearing out the tree and all the decorations. We did that last week, however. Note made on mailpage about a website mentioned earlier on Jerry Pournelle's FTL page. I realize I could probably stay with these pages all day, but I must try and get other things done.
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Thursday 14.01I have been offered to "teach" OO/J++ related matter, for 5 days in late February, in sort of full-day seminar form, to a group of people who are being "trained" in web work (part of a much longer course called "webmaster" -- a labor market training program for unemployed). Great! -- I think? No formal guidelines as such I hear; I can do pretty much as I want. Only, what do I (or for that matter, the participants) really want? Investigating that some, especially what level these people are supposed to be at, and also the question of what kind of books might be appropriate, if any. I think I will try out some recent thoughts I have about OO-design teaching methodology. Trouble is, I hardly know where to begin with this in the context of web-design of all things. So I have been writing on a 5 day outline going from generalities to specific examples of Java applets and Java implemented sites. So many degrees of freedom here when I can set my own agenda... Argh -- the frustrations of freedom...
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Friday 15.01Catching up on some paperwork. Ought to close the books on 1998 now and do the accounting reports, in good time for a change. Recent years have tended to see frantic last minute calculations for the tax declarations, hours before the filing deadline. Must not let that become a long-term habit. I keep trying for the paperless office, but everyone insists on sending me reams of paper. I just don't get it... :) Spent an hour or two scouring a few websites for required forms. No luck -- I'll just have to get the paper versions. And Isabel reports that the car is suddenly showing a red alert for charging. We've known there has been an electrical problem brewing by the ominous flickering of lights sometimes when at idle. Now it has gone critical, either the problem itself, or something else. Our car (VW Coach) used to be a taxi before we bought it second-hand. The wiring was then redone in various odd ways to accommodate extra lights, taxi signs, radios, and other taxi-related add-ons. The result of this conversion and restoration to "civilian use" has been a few oddities, but up until now nothing seriously wrong. Typically, this happens now, with just weeks before it has to pass the official yearly inspection.
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Saturday 16.01A most pe-cu-li-ar day... I won't go into the details, except to say that most of the day was consumed by telephone calls concerning others' domestic problems and foiled social plans for the kids. Went to a local video shop with my daughter to pick up a video or two for the kids as consolation, but ended up coming home with a couple of cd-games that I found on sale there.
Neither game is up to the standard of say Timelapse, but perhaps at least worth the sale price (about USD 10 each) in terms of variety.
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Sunday 17.01Now, I have in my years also lived on farms, but there are aspects to modern farming which can drive me to distraction. Last night was one such occasion. We live in a small city surrounded by much of Sweden's farming lands, and given the appropriate season and winds, you can smell this quite clearly. Unfortunately, this also includes a number of modern "pig factories". Like all "large" installations, these contribute to pollution, in particular smell pollution. A few times a year, the winds are appallingly wrong at moments when I suppose the holding tanks are emptied or whatever. Sometime in the wee hours, I was tossing and turning, and began to sense this... smell. Ok, sometimes one has a bad stomach and has to do one's part to replenishing the ozone layer :) But then I realized it was coming from outside and just getting stronger and stronger... To make a long story short: for about an hour or so I was very tangibly reminded of certain passages in Dante's Inferno.
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bo@leuf.com. |